Brownfields: Poems (10+ Anniversary Edition)

Brownfields are contaminated lots that dot the landscape from coast to coast, emblems of our post-industrial society. They are at once more and less than derelict space: unsuited for development without costly remediation, many will lie fallow forever, rebuking us with a silence that is not the charged quiet of nature but the emptiness of human loss. They serve as the dominant metaphor in this poetic “autogeography” of Owen Sound as its spaces, peoples and institutions transform over an arc of time extending from the geologic past through fin-de-siècle irony to turn of the millennium confusion.

Equal parts lament and encomium, brownfields is a chronicle of Owen Sound as both a particular place and as an example of many a small Canadian city struggling to renew itself and find footing in a globalized world.